Malcolm ‘Mal’ Reynolds was the captain of the Firefly-class transport ship Serenity. During the Unification War, Mal fought for the Independents and was the highest ranking Browncoat to participate in and survive the Battle of Serenity Valley.
Mal was born on September 20, 2468 and was brought up on a ranch on the planet Shadow. Raised by his mother and “about 40 hands,” Mal apparently received a fairly decent education growing up. Though Mal usually seems more practical than intellectual, he occasionally surprised his friends by displaying familiarity in a wide range of literature varying from the works of Shan Yu, a psychotic dictator, to poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He does, however, have no idea “who” Mona Lisa was.
Quote: I’ll take the shuttle in closer. Zoe, ship is yours. Remember, if anything happens to me, or you don’t hear from me within the hour… you take this ship and you come and you rescue me.
Today is Louisa May Alcott’s birthday. She was born in Philadelphia in 1832.
The Statue of Liberty was unveiled on October 28, 1886. Today is her 130th birthday.
Today is Richter Scale Day when we commemorate the birth of Charles Richter. In 1935, the seismologists Charles Francis Richter and Beno Gutenberg, of the California Institute of Technology, developed the (future) Richter magnitude scale, specifically for measuring earthquakes in a given area of study in California, as recorded and measured with the Wood-Anderson torsion seismograph. Richter derived his earthquake-magnitude scale from the apparent magnitude scale used to measure the brightness of stars.
Gunsmoke and Knitting 